Biz & IT —

Adobe’s PDF now an ISO standard

PDF has been approved by the ISO to become the ISO 32000 standard, pending the …

At the end of January 2007, Adobe submitted its Portable Document Format (PDF) to the ISO. Now, as the year winds to a close, Adobe has announced that PDF 1.7 has been approved by the ISO and will become the ISO 32000 standard (DIS). According to a blog post by Adobe PDF architect and senior principal scientist Jim King, the standard was approved by a vote of 13:1, with one country (Russia) abstaining and one country (France) voting against.

On January 21, King will present responses to the 205 comments made by the voting nations, including the 125 comments made by the United States and the 37 comments made by the French. If all comments are satisfactorily addressed during the January 21-23 time period, the revised standard will be published afterwards. If comments remain to be addressed after this meeting, the standard will enter a two-month voting period on the Final Draft International Standard or FDIS. The question of what the French don't like about PDF and what comments they submitted was raised by readers multiple times in response to King's post. Sadly, King has no answers, and I wasn't able to turn anything up, either.

Although previous subsets of PDF (specifically PDF/Archive and PDF/Exchange) have been considered by the ISO, the approval of the entire document format as a new standard will impact its development in the future. From this point forward, the ISO, rather than Adobe, is in charge of the PDF specification and any changes that are incorporated into it. According to King, none of the current licensing terms for the PDF standard will change, as it's already licensed for free and readily available to anyone wishing to develop software capable of reading, writing, or processing PDF, but he posits that Adobe's Acrobat suite might see an increased level of competition from other companies as a result of the ISO certification.

Although King doesn't mention this in his blog post, Adobe's push for ISO certification has largely been seen as a response to Microsoft's XPS standard (and self-styled PDF-killer). Not much appears to have happened since Redmond submitted XPS to Ecma last July, but Adobe obviously hopes that PDF's new standing as an ISO standard will serve as a bulwark against any attempt Microsoft might make to push the competing document format out of the market.